AN EYE FOR SCENES UNSEEN
by
Leonard Reiffel
Presented at the Joint Meeting of
The Chicago Literary Club
and
The Fortnightly of Chicago
March 1, 2002
I do not know exactly when it was that I first met him. It was certainly in the late 1940s
amid the building international tensions of the postwar Atomic Age. It seems most likely that
my 50-plus year acquaintanceship with the remarkable man I am delighted to tell you about
tonight began in 1949 when, as a callow 22-year-old, I found myself in charge of the first of
a long series of secret projects aimed at monitoring the frightening progress of the Soviet
nuclear program. He, a decade or so my senior and already a nationally-known microscopist,
was the key scientist on another project with closely related intent but radically different
methods. My projects involved fancy electronics, romantic-sounding missions in B-29 probe
aircraft, balloon launches from tropical islands and a whole catalog of other exotica. Frankly,
the deepest reason I was audacious enough to take on my assignment was that it whispered
seductively of world-wide adventure. His project, by contrast, mostly required that he sit
quietly in his rather small lab, his long-distance swimmer's shoulders hunched over, peering
thoughtfully through one of his many beloved microscopes. Our interests were joined because
my projects also happened to be a rich source of very minute but massively revealing
particles collected from the clouds created by nuclear explosions..
Whenever that first meeting occurred, one quirky memory of it sticks with me. I came away
swearing one of his eyes was a different color than the other although, in later meetings, it
did not seem so. As I prepared for this evening, I asked him, through his charming wife and
colleague Lucy, how I might have gotten such an impression. I was informed that in those
days he had had a condition that ultimately required an early version of an artificial lens
implant in one eye. Apparently, I had been detecting bluish light from nearby windows
scattering off the afflicted lens. Over the years, that artificial lens has proved to be very
handy. Unlike a natural lens, it transmitted ultraviolet light. Coupled with his prodigious
observational skills, that allowed him to see things not directly visible to ordinary mortals.
Although he toiled quietly at his lab bench by day, this master microscopist had a
well-earned reputation around campus for three other activities: First, he loved fast cars, very
fast cars. Second, it was common knowledge that he was an extraordinarily active ladies man
by night and weekends. Third, he was a remarkable swimmer given, winter or summer and
many times a week, to life-risking and lonely swims from Chicago's south side beaches out to
the distant water intake cribs in Lake Michigan. In fact, those swims continued until quite
recently. There is, by the way, one sad sidebar about his swimming power: Another
laboratory staff member--a Canadian chemist named Victor and an excellent swimmer in his
own right--once decided to accompany him on just such a swim. Tragically and for whatever
reason, Victor never came back.
Now while I was much impressed by the stories of fast cars and swimming prowess, those
were not what interested me the most. Since he was obviously older and famously wise about
such things, I was eager to learn about his methods of meeting the opposite sex in the hope
that I might, at least faintly, try to emulate them. With hormones abuzz, I screwed up my
courage one day and asked him point-blank just where and how in Chicago and particularly
around the heavily male-dominated IIT campus one might go about meeting more girls. He
looked up very slowly from his microscope. "Women are everywhere," he growled softly as if
I'd asked something absolutely idiotic about the microscopic sample he was working on. He
then silently returned to peering into his instrument leaving me in full and flustered retreat.
In a strictly theoretical sense, his answer was correct. But it certainly didn't do me much
practical good. Only after a considerable number of bungled experiments on the topic, did I
finally come to understand that his answer was right in practice as well as in theory. And
over the five decades since our first meeting, as we shall briefly glimpse, his opinions have
proven to be wonderfully correct about many other things.
As an undergraduate at Cornell, he started a money-making tutoring school for chemistry
students at Cornell. A little later, as a grad student with instructor rank, he taught courses in
chemical microscopy while simultaneously hiring himself out as a consultant. For example, he
earned handsome fees by determining the fiber content of various samples for local textile
companies. His analytical technique consisted of just looking at a sample for a second or two
after which he would write down a list all the different fibers it contained to an accuracy of
five to ten per cent and send off a bill.
Perhaps I should pause here to note that chemical microscopists typically use the light
microscope as a primary tool to look at tiny features of surfaces or samples of substances to
understand their chemical and physical nature, origins, history or other characteristics of
interest. The samples studied can be much smaller than the diameter of a human hair. Colors
and effects due to polarized light and observation of reactions or melting patterns of samples
followed by re-solidification are very important supplementary tools. Forensic microscopy,
featured in countless TV crime series these days, is a sub-specialty of this field.
Teaching generation after generation of microscopists was destined to become a lifelong
endeavor for this man. He and his staff have trained over 30,000 microscopists in his
constantly active private not-for-profit school here in Chicago and in special courses all over
the world. And all this while publishing over 600 scientific papers and contending with some
of the most demanding and controversial world-class analytical challenges imaginable.
All of his professional life, he has worked seven days a week. Until very recently, his day
routinely began at 4AM with a solitary walk from his near south-side apartment to his south
Michigan Avenue laboratory through blocks of deserted and potentially dangerous streets. An
adrenaline-raising parallel or substitute for long distance swimming? Perhaps so, but I suspect
he would deny it with a straight face.
Let me take you now into the private Research Institute where he and his associates have
labored for the past 45 years. It's present home is an unassuming building of roughly 10,000
square feet anonymously set back off the 2800 block of South Michigan Avenue.
As you walk in, you are very likely to be greeted by a yellow blur swooping across in front
of you. Richard E. Byrd, a yellow and black-feathered cockatiel with red-orange cheeks that
has the run of the entire building, has noticed your arrival. Over the years, I've been
thoroughly swooped upon by several of his predecessors.
Nearly every wall of every corridor is hung with scores of pictures and mementos. Many of
the pictures are striking abstracts or scenes of gorgeous landscapes but these are not the
handiwork of human artists. They are scenes of the tiny but magnificent worlds that exist
only on the stage of the chemical microscopist's polarizing microscope. Mostly the images
were created for purely analytical purposes without aesthetic motivation. But some in the
collection are deliberate manipulations by a visiting professional artist who is only secondarily
a microscopist.
Yet another corridor displays all the covers of The Microscope, an internationally respected
and widely read quarterly journal devoted to all aspects of microscopy. The first issue
appeared in 1937. It has been faithfully edited and published out of this building after being
taken over many decades ago.
We walk past several classrooms busy with intensely interested students, many are mature
scientists in their own right, bent over their microscopes or listening to staff lectures on
techniques and tricks of the trade. Another open door reveals a large and cluttered room
obviously in process of being organized. In the room is essentially the entire history of
chemical microscopy in the form the actual lab benches and hand-built equipment of those,
before the present owner, who created the field. In addition to being a great practitioner of his
art and science, the head of this lab has a wonderful sense of history. Over the years, he has
single-handedly rescued these irreplaceable artifacts from junk heaps at Cornell, IIT, and
many other places.
What is especially striking as one strolls around, and profoundly characteristic of the master
at work here, is the almost total absence of the latest high-powered and expensive analytical
equipment to be found in most other modern facilities. That is simply because the head of
this laboratory doesn't NEED them. In fact, he has described himself as enjoying microscopy
in a very "anti-high-tech" way. He can do it but there are almost no others who can. Small
wonder the American Chemical Society named him Analytical Chemist of the Year in 1999..
A crucially important secret of his success is his sample collection. It contains a
mind-boggling variety of things such as asbestos particles, fibers from ancient textiles, paint
and pigment samples representing practically the whole history of painting and uncountable
numbers of other reference materials from industrial processes and the natural world. The
range of problems he has attacked and often solved using only his eyes, his brain, his sample
collection and his microscope is dazzling. There is time to tell you of only a few examples
out of thousands.
Some years ago, a rather famous artifact called The Vinland Map, owned by Yale University,
made world-wide headlines. If genuine, it would mean that the Vikings explorers had reached
Greenland and parts of continental North America around 1440AD -fifty years before
Columbus.
The black lines drawn on the parchment of the map appeared to show yellowish edges just as
would be expected from the centuries long slow diffusion of ink components out of the lines.
Clear sticky tape was applied to a few tiny areas. The yellowish material peeled off in as side
markings along the edges of the darker ink. The fakery was almost instantly obvious but to
make sure, the tiny yellowish flakes caught on the tapes were put under the microscope.
Those all-seeing eyes quickly identified calcite, titanium white, yellow ochre and lead white.
Wrong chemicals, especially titanium, wrong crystal types. The Vinland Map was painted in
1930.
On one of my visits, there were four or five purported Picassos leaning casually
against a wall as he and I discussed a supposed Manet that, by coincidence, had been
acquired years earlier by my next-door neighbor Andrew Brainerd. I believe all the Picassos
turned out to be fakes. The Manet is quite another matter. All the chemical microscopy
checks out beautifully and with great precision as do the materials of the frame and canvas.
Certain scraping methods used in other Manets are there too. The problem is the art historians
don't have a provenance on the Brainerd Manet. Thus far they are unwilling to accept its
authenticity even though the odds of it being a forgery are vanishingly small. Every trace
chemical and crystal type in the Brainerd painting is also appropriately present in other fully
accepted Manets. Brainerd has financed every conceivable test to buttress his case. I even
concocted an experiment done using the huge accelerator x-ray source at Brookhaven
National Laboratory to try to get a little more data and Alex Kossalapov, a physicist and
Chief of Authentication at the great Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg joined the team.
There is great tension between art historians and science these days and the historians are
loath to surrender their power to science. The man with the magic eyes has said that the
Brainerd Manet is the most certain authenticity analysis he has ever done. In response, a
panicky art historian suggested that someone borrowed Manet's palette, paints and brushes
and whipped out the painting in Manet's style while he was out of his studio! And there, at
least for now, the matter stands.
In a similar limbo are a Leonardo and a Giorgione that also came through the lab. A
gentleman named John Harrington owns them. Very convincing objective data on the
authenticity of both paintings was collected and has been presented. It has been strong enough
to convince some key authorities, but those who rule the prices put on art are not admitting
anything yet. One is tempted to mutter, "None are so are blind as those that will not see--"
especially given all the recanted attributions of supposed Rembrandts that have embarrassed
great museums lately. Science can help avoid such goings on both with respect to detecting
forgeries and endorsing true art, but there are obviously huge amounts of money at stake and
clearly some people are not anxious to really know---or to know too soon.
One last and probably most famous example of things that have been examined in that
modest building on South Michigan Avenue: The Shroud of Turin. Using simple sticky tape
again, thirty-two samples of the materials making up the image on the shroud and the cloth
on which it appears were taken yielding thousands of tiny fibers and particles. After
extraordinarily careful and exceptionally exhaustive examination, Dr. Walter C. McCrone, the
man about whom I have be speaking tonight, announced that there was no blood on the
Shroud but rather paints of specific and clearly identified compositions that had been
beautifully applied by a talented artist. Based on what his eyes and his microscope told him,
he estimated that the Shroud had been created around 1400 AD. Impressively, about a full
decade later, carbon dating tests by three world-class independent labs yielded 1325 AD
+/_65 years. McCrone's work on the Shroud has brought death threats and endless attacks
that continue to this day. He has withstood the onslaughts with patience, equanimity and
courage and gone on to other things. His summary book on the Shroud, carefully and
completely detailing his and the work of others on the Shroud, was published in 1997. It
makes for interesting reading.
Walter McCrone is now 85 years old. He is in fragile health although he was working
as usual until about 6 months ago. Those marvelous eyes of his may be dimming now. Ah,
but what wonders they have seen!